What you were expecting is almost impossible to achieve, in fact its impossible... When a "500GB" HDD is manufactured it will tell you that on the box ("500 GB") and its in fact a 500GB, what the box do not tell you is that its an "unformatted 500GB" HDD, if you want to use that 500GB HDD you'll need to format it, and it actually becomes a ~465GB HDD, that w/o the OS or anything else...

I know PS4 allows over 400GBs, plus you can read and manage your space unlike Xbox One. Overall, Xbox One is just a beta box right now. I'm sure It'll be fixed in 2014 like most of the lacking or missing features. Imho, Xbox One is clearly not ready. It's not worth the current asking price imo.

Seriously MS this is 2013 ffs. For $500, you shouldn't hide the HDD space from the user.

What you might argue is that when they tell you 500GB they are (conveniently) using the scientific notation of 1 Giga = 10^9 and not the one used in Computer Science (1 Giga = 2^30) (Every HDD is marketed this way...)

@M1ST4K3 You are correct however MS is one of the few major OS producers that actually take giga to mean 1024 x mega rather than 1000 x mega. As far as I'm aware, Apple's various OS's and some other do use the recent (and lexicologically accurate) definition of 1000 and refer to 1024 as gibi rather than giga.

It's really false advertising on MS's behalf if they use mixed standards.

Its probably all the software that comes with the OS. Not sure how much pre-installed crap they put on it but it seems like a lot. Sony also has a bunch of pre-installed stuff I wish I could take off but doesn't effect me too much. MS is 2x as bad though with the space management. Worst part is you cant change your HD w/o voiding your warranty with the xb1 lol. Talk about all in one /s.

If I paid $500 for this system I should have the right to see how much GB of space I have left. MS are getting me mad already. They better give me the option to see the amount of space I have left or they can forget me supporting this system when it comes to buying software for it.

Microsofts own website has a chart in the answers section showing what a unformatted drive is after formatting. The answer for the 500GB is 465Ggib in capacity. I 465gb-362gb=103gb No Microsoft operating system is 103GB Even the large ones fit on a dvd, some of that has to be pre loaded content, and or reserved space. Is it instant ads? An insane amount of preferred Apps? Surprise free games? Surprise free movies? A huge reserve to insure 3rd parties have what they want for content downloaded automatically? All of the above?

A 500 GB HDD loses 35GB after a format no matter what. So we're left with 465. So if its full at 362GB that means the OS is 103GB !!! Holey $hit. That's more bloat than a 4 x full Windows 7 installations!

Actually, on top of that, there is something MANY people do not know about quoted hard drive sizes. It's actually funny that Microsoft is mainly a software/OS company and yet they STILL report the manufacturers quoted hard drive space. HDD manufacturers report HDD space as being 1000 bytes equals 1 Megabyte instead of the actual 1024 bytes equals 1 Megabyte. Continuing this real-world logic into Gigabytes would show that there is 7% less space than what is reported in a "500GB" HDD. The real world number comes out to 465.54GBs. So, a completely unused, 500GB hard drive only has 465.54GBs of real-world space. Then, you have the OS and other software and drivers as well as preloaded apps and other sectioned off space (maybe things like virtual memory for example).

Of coarse, this is only under Windows... every other OS uses even numbers in 1 Mbyte = 1000 bytes

They could have said 480 of 500gb and you witch hunting fool's would be like; That's super weak, no wonder they didn't...insert some lame recycled hate. News flash people that own the Xbox One love the system and this won't change that. Get over it. I know, I know your thinking but, but, 1080p!!!!!!! You guys are like a bunch of children in a room all shouting at the top of your lungs. "Xbox, be awesome" oh wait it already is that...

Correct. I am sure this is not exclusive to X1. Anyway, I expect some acceptable solutions to be presented in the near future. Since the drive is built in, I would expect them to have an external option, which they already said is coming.

In the mean time I would just delete games that I would not be going back to anytime soon. 20 full games is plenty.

Yeah, but that's not including game updates, DLC, and hardware updates. And seeing how devs seem to only be getting lazier and lazier as their quality standards dwindle further to reach that beloved fall release, we're looking at some BF3 situations where there's like an additional 10 gigs of patches to get the game at a quality level. Not all cases, but an increasing number. With all that, i'm seeing more like 16 games and a little wiggle room for good measure. An external hard drive will be a necessity a LOT sooner than we hoped.

Well, game updates and hardware updates usually just overwrite older files (note: usually) so those don't really count too much. DLC does but I doubt 1-3gb DLC (and usually lower) will warrant that much space.

But the problem is that the X1 doesn't have any extra memory space to it until they fix the external memory. The PS4 you can at least switch the HDD. Do we know when the X1 is releasing the external storage fix?

Go to setting > system storage management on the PS4, it tells you how many space the PS4 has, (it should have around 408 GB of free space for you to use); how many games/apps can be installed? that I don't know, maybe it has a cap on games/applications installed at the same time (just like the PSV which is 100 apps), maybe it does not, who knows!

The Xbox One doesn`t show you the amount of store available, there is no data/save game management option on the console besides of being able to uninstall games and apps, but it doesn`t say how much space it has at all and how much is used.

1tb hybrid drive, $129 @ best buy, probably quite a bit cheaper online. I'd much rather replace the system hard drive than have some external hooked up. No idea why MS won't allow this without breaking warranty.

Worst part is that it made going all physical complicated too! Because now we have to install every game, sometimes as big as 50gb, you can no longer just decide to play a random game of your 20+ game library, even if you have 2TB HDD, it may still require deleting and installing stuff before playing depending on the size of your games.

Yay technology. Making us wait more than we had to last gen (and that goes for both MS and Sony).

U see, thats what pisses me off, misleading information. and that goes for PS4 too. if they advertise 500G of storage u should be able to use it all, not 362G....how can they used over 100G of storage of the 500G? beats me!

That's not possible because per installed stuff like the ui and junk take up memory. At least on PS4 you can upgrade your HDD anytime you want up to 2TB. But when I do get a Xbone (when the price comes way down) 500GB PR however much is available to use will be enough because I will only use my Xbone for exclusives like Halo.

No... Im not, but letme ask u this; PS2 had any hard drive? Some people will say not, but I fact it has some sorth of storage for ui and other stuff but it was NOT accessible to us. Thats my point, I dont care if ui requires 200G, but if they said it come 500 y should I care if I can oly use 362G. Just freaking adv 362G.

I k it has never be like this in the history of storage devices, but when they take more than 30% off, we shoul be concern.

Can some one tell me how much of the wiiu is accessible, out of thr 32G?

On topic: Every HDD does this. It says it is 500GB but that is not fully available to you. Same thing goes for phones, Ipod's, cameras, anything with internal storage. Its not misleading information. You just don't know how HDD's work. But i do agree that there is some space that is being taken away from you on the XB1 that makes you wonder whats taking it.

20 games is a lot right now. My PS3 is sitting here with around 50 digital games loaded on it. That's not including the library of discs I have sitting on the shelf. In three years, 20 games is going to be nothing.

Growing pains I think. Eventually we will tell stories of yore when we used to put circles in drives that made noises to play games. I'm an optimist, I believe we will sort these minor issues out in the next ten years.

20 games and 25 apps, is it bad? I think a lot, because when I finish a game and I leave one there installed time if you do not see the game more, delete the installation, leave only installed games online. I think players these days want to have over 200 games on a console lol, I think 10 games is more than sufeciente, so having installed if we do not play games? I'm gamer will 20years and never played more than 10 games at a time. I prefer to play 1 at a time, and finished by hand and then othe experiment is that, as already said, only with online games that makes us go there sometimes is that it pays to be on the hard drive even in the pc, never had more than 10 games installed and have 2TB

I would be in your camp as well, 1-4 games tops any given moment. I think not having the option to install or not to install compared to the past is the main driver of frustration here. Coupled with an unfriendly storage management system(so far). At least this can all easily be fixed in the future.

You are missing one key point...there can be multiple users per system. So there could be a family of 5 that own one. Dad has 4-5 games he plays installed. Older son has a few games installed and little Timmy has a few kid games installed. Maybe mom has a bunch of casual stuff downloaded from the online store. This would add up fast.

although your comment has a point it is not very likely. Regardless 20 games is plenty and come next year we'll be able to have an external HDD or who knows maybe MS will be smart and come up with a solution to let us install a Internal HDD

1TB, 2TB or 3TB+ external HDDs should be allowed as storage back up devices. Knowing Microsoft they may make force you to buy expensive Microsoft HDDs like they did for the XBox 360. PS3 offered gamers more choice to replace their HDDs with cheap larger third party HDDs.

Hopefully plugging in an external HDD will be a solution in the future. Not a branded or overpriced version either. One thing that bugged me a lot last gen was the storage solution, granted it got better near the end, but still not the most consumer friendly.

Hm either way that is my only guess that so little space is left and I can see why its a problem this gen. Any games I seen digital that are full titles are around at least just about 50GB. This is what I saw on a friends PS4 so I imagine its about the same.

Just pathetic. I was shocked to find no options for managing disk space when looking over the Xbox One UI. Microsoft has gone insane with taking options out of the users control. Nothing angers me more than when companies think they know what's best for you and completely restrict access to basic functions.

So many hatred responses, so little understanding. That 90GB is not just the OS, it is "RESERVED"! That means that after you fill up the space you just used for installing games and other media, the system keeps that open for a working system.

For instance if you want to play a game without fully installing it, but just have it playable, it probably places it's files in this reserved space. If you stream a movie, part of the buffer probably goes into this reserve space. If they hadn't done this, the system would become buggy after you filled it up completely.

Now before you go "OMG I WANT TO SEE WHATI INSTALL!" or "THAT IS IMPOSSIBLE!", the very first xbox already used this system. It reserved a few GB's for game caching on it's hard drive, the first new game would overwrite the last played one, with 6 games maximally being "cached" on the HDD for faster loading. At the same time the system also reserved space for MP3's (Custom soundtracks) and saves. Each having their own partition.

So very likely that 90MB you are "Missing" is not filled up with an OS. It is reserved for the OS, non fully installed game installs where you cache from disk and other things like that.

I should add that, the GB calculation is the reason so many DF comparisons report the 360 install sizes to be "smaller" than PS3, throughout this last gen. In truth/actual bytes, they are almost always much closer to identical than the reported GB sizes are.

There was a big journalism outcry over Microsoft's Surface Pro not having as much available space as the Macbook Air for a while, as well... turns out they were basically identical, after you realized Apple was using the same "make the GB more" method the HDD companies use to bloat their numbers, and MS wasn't.

This is a fairly uninformed story -- I'm actually surprised IGN would do such a shoddy job. Or am I? I guess it gets them hits, right?

i think its terrible how these console manufacturers advertise a specific harddrive size and then give us nothing of the sort. the size they advertise should be the amount available to the gamer for use.